The World is a Dream, What Part of You is Them?

This is another good exercise for getting practice in observing our habitual emotional mind-sets and modes of behavior. Psychotherapists and psychiatrists have helped us get a handle on our hidden motivations and fears by dream analysis. Our dreams may be frightening or confused, but we can understand that it is we ourselves who people our dreams, with our thoughts and feelings taking their symbolic roles of people and things.

At first we may be shocked when we tell the therapist about some mean act perpetrated upon us in our dreams by a hated rival and hear the question, "Okay, now what part of you does this person symbolize?" We can get pretty good at seeing that even the worst monsters in our nightmares are really aspects of our own motivations or fears. When we think we are pretty good at analyzing our dreams, we can do the same thing with our real life. We can analyze our daily life as if it were a dream we had last night. Take a situation, a mean-spirited person, a living nightmare and analyze it as if it is just a dream. This is another way of widening our horizon and becoming more objective about our experiences.

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